


See That Dawn

by lotenots



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: ? - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Bar/Pub, Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Alternate Universe - Punk, Book of Nile, F/F, F/M, Found Family, Idiots in Love, Keane/Joe is minimal, Kid Fic, M/M, Nile has a crush, Power Moms, Power Wives, Slow Burn, au - bar, gays in love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:39:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27770116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotenots/pseuds/lotenots
Summary: “Nile says she’s got someone who could be a good fit. Her new drummer?”“Nile has a new drummer? What happened to Johnny?”Quynh gave him a look, “Joe. Honey. I know you’re on boyfriend island right now.” He flushed, opening his mouth to protest as she held up a hand, “and I have Nothing To Say About That.” Joe could hear the capitalization in his head. Quynh was very good at that.-------------------------------------------Sometimes you've got a shitty boyfriend, good friends and decent job. And then your boss wants more time with the kiddo, and the new guy is worryingly handsome despite (because of?) the goddamn cutoff jorts he wears.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Keane, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 6
Kudos: 76





	See That Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> Imma be real, I haven't written fic in years, but this sprang into my head and won't let me go, so I'm going to try to let it out. I don't really know how it's already become this long especially since it's mostly (hopefully?) just a vehicle for an eventual after hours blowjob. 
> 
> I'm writing Andy as Ukrainian because Scythia was generally focused around the Black Sea. 
> 
> I do not live in London, and I am doing my best with google maps, but please let me know if there are any glaring inconsistencies. I do not have a beta, and I would not be opposed to acquiring one. 
> 
> CW - There are a few minor derogatory terms and swears thrown around, mostly in a loving way, but I just want people to be aware.

It was honestly a fairly quiet Tuesday. The bar didn’t open until 4, and Joe had gotten in early to work on some posters for next weekend while keeping an eye on Trăng. Andy was closed in the office and he could hear her muffled voice swearing at the distributor. 

“Look, James. I know you have other places but I need those two more flats of tallboys this week. По хуй! No we’ve got a big show...” 

There was a pause, Joe looked over at the three year old sitting across from him. Her small, serious face was fully focused on the piece of paper on the table in front of her, a red crayon held in her chubby fist as she slowly drew loops around the top of the page. The conversation in the office restarted again, Andy obviously annoyed. They’d only been working with this new distributor for a few months and while Copley Distributing was better than Merrick’s, they were new and experiencing some growing pains. Pains that Andy felt were not her problem, and she didn’t care if James had misordered and was low on PBR tallboys or Adnam’s Ghost Ship tinnies. 

Joe turned his attention back to his laptop. Spring meant more bands touring and they’d expanded their show schedule from three nights a week to five, which meant more posters, and a few more hours of work a week. He delved back in, getting into a decent photoshop groove, handing Trăng requested crayon colors from the big box beside him as needed. 

The quiet spell over the booth was broken by two bowls sliding across the table, and Quynh settling in next to her daughter, “hello my little potato!” she squeezed the little girl and was rewarded with a squeak. Quynh slumped backwards into the booth while Joe rolled his shoulders with a sigh and closed the laptop, reaching for the larger of the steaming bowls piled high with pierogi, topped with sour cream and dark rye bread. 

“Nooooo _ вуйко! _” Joe paused with his hand on the bowl, and looked at the little girl grinning at him. “Oh Trăng is this your bowl? Are you so big now you can eat twenty dumplings all on your own?!” Dramatically, Joe swooned sideways, “my little niece! So big and tall and strong! She will eat one hundred dumplings soon! We will be bereft, eaten out of house and home!” As he thumped over on the bench Trăng’s giggles got louder, “вуйко, I eat ‘erogi! No dumplings!”

Quynh scoffed quietly at the familiar playacting, and placed the smaller bowl with just five pierogi in front of her daughter. “Big girl you gotta let Joe eat his pierogies too, how will he grow up big and strong without them? We need him to keep up his strength so he can carry around all those kegs.” She paused, “and you!” Trăng made a little pout and pushed the larger bowl towards Joe’s side of the table as he sat up.

Joe looked Quynh over, while Trăng carefully disemboweled her potato dumplings with a bar spoon. She looked tired, her dark hair falling out of the high bun, still wearing her splattered apron. “Look, Joe.” Her voice was quiet and his stomach dropped a little even as his hand curled around the fork. “Have you talked to Andy today?” He gave her a tight grin. “Andy? Andy who? My darling boss who’s been stuck in the office cussing out one James Copley for the past hour? Your beloved wife? The fair and terrifying owner of this fine establishment?” Quynh huffed out a laugh. 

Joe fiddled with the slice of bread on the side of his bowl. “She’s been on the phone since I got here, we haven’t really had time to chat.” He sighed, “What’s going on?” Quynh eyed the small child sitting next to her, Trăng was fully focused on removing the dough skins of her lunch to one side of the bowl, heaping the steaming filling into a small mountain topped with rivulets of melting sour cream. She quietly switched to French, a family habit when talking about potentially delicate-to-little-ears conversations. 

“I think we need to hire a cook.” Joe squidged up his face in confusion. Quynh was the bar cook, and she was amazing at it. They’d even had a run in the last few months after some big foodie instagram had waxed poetic over their ‘innovative take on the hearty foods of Eastern Europe!’

“Don’t do that or your face will stick that way. It’s just.” She sighed. “Between running the kitchen and booking shows and” she looked sideways at Trăng, “it’s a lot. And I know the bar is doing ok financially but her preschool is SO expensive. And I feel like I hardly see her.” Quynh looked suddenly so sad and Joe felt his heart hurt. He knew the feeling of immigrant parents worked to the bone to make ends meet, being a child and barely seeing them as they went from one shift to the next. 

He’d been lucky, his parents had settled into Birmingham fairly easily, and his father’s medical credentials had managed to transfer with only a few hiccups, but those first handful of years had been isolating and hard. Joe knew Quynh wasn’t particularly close to her family, and they’d drunkenly commiserated over the trials of being first gen enough times. 

Her face shifted then, to the righteous annoyance that was a much more common sight. “It is literally cheaper for us to hire a cook for a few shifts a week and have me stay home than it is to pay for her goddamn daycare. It’s not even that good of a daycare!” She scowled, “most of the EU has free or subsidized it but noooo. Not here!”

Joe laughed, this was a common complaint between Andy and Quynh since they’d had Trăng three years ago. The refrain tended to end in “it’s almost as bad as America” after Nile had joined their little band and one time chimed in with an explanation of her home country’s view on childcare, to their horror. 

Relaxing, he dug back into his lunch, “Honestly? I think it’s a great idea. It’d be good for all three of you,” he smiled at Quynh as she relaxed “she deserves to be spoiled rotten by her Mums and you should be around and well rested enough to do it.” 

Andy flung open the office door with a satisfied smirk on her face, clear evidence of a successful negotiation with the distributor, Joe almost felt bad for the guy. Trăng, finished with her quiet destruction and partial consumption of her meal, beamed and slipped off the bench, under the table and bolted towards her mother, “мама!” With a growl Andy snatched up the toddler and flipped her upside down with a shouted “who is this little monster in my bar!” as Trăng shrieked with laughter. Andy righted her and settled the little girl onto one boney hip, walking over the table, smacking a kiss first to her daughter's soft curls, and then one to her wife’s upturned face, leaning against the booth. 

Joe switched back to English. “Any idea on who we should hire?” 

Andy eyeballed her wife, and he watched them have a whole conversation in a few silent moments. He’d been working at The Old Guard bar for about four years, and they’d become fast friends, practically his family in that time. Andy and Quynh had been a lifeline when he’d moved to London, trying to find his feet as an artist in a city that relied more on who you know than how talented you are. 

They’d all been more than a little co-dependant. They still were. Andy and Quynh had somehow managed to run the bar with just the two of them in the year after Lykon died. He’d been Andy’s best friend, practically her brother. Their friendship started the moment a gangly and sullen teenaged Andy and her mother had moved from the Ukraine into the South London council flats. Some chav had called her a soviet dyke and Andy punched his lights out while Lykon clapped on the sidelines. 

Joe never met Lykon, but his presence was everywhere. He and Andy had started the bar together, somehow scraping up the funds to buy the business when they were in their mid 20’s, the two of them clinging to each other in the face of Andy’s mother’s death. She still joked from time to time that she would have married Lykon if she hadn’t been such a lesbian, grinning at Quynh’s cheerful barbs that he always was too good for her. 

Lykon’s touch was in the layout of the bar, the color of the walls, an old photo of his smiling face sandwiched between Quynh and Andy tacked up in the office. The framed letter in their flat that had Quynh cackling the first time Joe read it in disbelief, “He had you read this at his funeral?!” turning to Andy as she laughed quietly holding an infant Trăng in her arms. Lykon was in Trăng’s gap-toothed grin, her curls, her dark skin. 

The letter had been his final gift, a teasing, profane ridden missive to ‘my two fave gays’ about how they’d be just fine, and Quynh better take good care of his bike, and wherever they sorted their shit out and got around to having his future niece or nephew, he’d made sure the kid would at least be cute. Joe made a face, “I’ve done you the honor of freezing some baby batter” Quynh was almost on the floor wheezing with laughter, “‘because we all know any child will be improved with my bone structure.’ Again, he had you read this at his FUNERAL?” 

“He was such a little shit. Of course we asked him to donate when we eventually had the money for the procedure, but then the cancer came and.” 

And then Lykon had died. And Andy and Quynh had buried themselves in the bar for over a year. And then Joe met them. He’d worked as a bartender when he lived in France for university, and when the in-vitro finally worked and they needed another set of hands, Joe was happy to step in and help. And have a solid paycheck. 

They’d hired a cook then too, some friend of a friend of Andy’s who’d been competent enough but did little more than reheating and plating. Quynh was still cooking, coming into the bar in the wee hours of the night with little Trăng bundled against her chest or back, Quynh’s quiet movements around the kitchen lulling her to sleep. The first six months after her birth it became a common occurrence with Joe shutting down the well, Andy doing the books at the bar, or asleep on a booth bench, and Quynh in the kitchen. 

It had been hard but they were doing better, Andy was still a workaholic, they all were. They’d hired Nile on last year, when she’d finished her marine service as an embassy guard. Just part time, mostly running the door for shows, sometimes being a barback for Joe on especially busy nights. She had a day job, but rent in London isn’t cheap. They’d met her when Quynh had booked her band for a show, and she’d ended up helping Joe, along with half the bar, throw some skinheads out. 

Andy hummed quietly, hitching Trăng up a little higher. “Nile says she’s got someone who could be a good fit. Her new drummer?” 

“Nile has a new drummer? What happened to Johnny?”

Quynh gave him a look, “Joe. Honey. I know you’re on boyfriend island right now.” He flushed, opening his mouth to protest as she held up a hand, “and I have Nothing To Say About That.” Joe could hear the capitalization in his head. Quynh was very good at that, and very not good at showing how much she didn’t like Keane. He scowled but she kept going, “Johnny’s visa expired last month, he had to move back home.”

At that Joe deflated. How had he missed that? It’s not like he and Johnny were really friends but. He was friends with Nile. She was practically his best friend, and he missed it? Yeah they’d both been busy, she had her day job and the band, and he’d been hired for a new mural and been spending time with Keane and. Ugh. 

He scrubbed his face with his hand. “No. Shi-. Shoot.” He looked at Trăng, who was wiggling in Andy’s grasp wanting to be put down. “I didn’t realize.” Andy placed her daughter on the floor and pinned him with her eyes, “We know. And it’s ok.” Quynh snorted but Andy ignored it. “Anyway, she has a new drummer, he’s looking for a job and she’s looking to get him off her couch. Apparently he can cook, and he’s tidy, and he’s coming in tomorrow for an interview and maybe a trial run. You can still pick this monster up from preschool right?” Joe nodded. “Good.”


End file.
